While the East Coast turns into a less-than-wonderful winter wonderland, the Department of Defense can rest assured that even their most advanced and finicky aircraft left out in the cold will be just fine. This piece of mind comes from testing done at the U.S. Air Force’s one-of-a-kind torture chamber: the McKinley…

About 40 miles outside of Moscow, in a secluded forest near a quiet town, sits a maze of towering Tesla Coil looking generators and conduits that seem anything but terrestrial. This lightning machine, the only of its kind, now sits abandoned... sort of.

There are so many bases, test and evaluation units, ranges and state of the art facilities, the U.S. defense research and development apparatus but the Missile Engagement Simulation Arena (MESA) is one of the strangest. Essentially, the U.S. Government built a giant sound stage to shoot films only missiles are ever…